Aside from her Real Life, self writes a lot of fan fiction, all in The Hunger Games universe. In her AU, she has come to use the following characters over and over:

Seneca

Plutarch

Cato

Hunger Games Plutarch is manipulative, a consummate politician. Hunger Games Seneca is a tool, pure and simple. Hunger Games Cato is a blonde, physically powerful type who ends up in a battle to the death with Katniss and Peeta. Guess who wins?

Now that she is reading The Decline and Fall, she is reminded that the above names actually belonged to real people.

In The Hunger Games, Cato is very much a bully.

In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon on p. 348 writes “we may learn from the example of Cato that a character of pure and inflexible virtue . . . ” In other words, RL Cato is a good guy.

#what

Self will stop here, as she’s having conniptions over some #APBreaking news about Paul Manafort and it is putting her in a very sullen state of mind.

Six months after the destruction of the Twelve Districts, Viper pilot Peeta Mellark is training several rookies when they are ambushed by an enemy fighter patrol. Ordering the recruits to retreat, he engages the enemy patrol alone and destroys most of them but not before suffering critical damage to his own fighter and being dragged into a nearby moon’s gravity well.

For this week’s challenge, try to look past the big picture and take a more intimate approach . . . zoom in on details in unexpected places.

— Jen H., The Daily Post

Today:

Interesting Adornments for a Mercedes Benz!

At the 2015 AWP Conference in Minneapolis, The Loft had a kind of raffle: You wrote the name of your favorite book and dropped it into a big tumbler. Then you picked out a card to see a book someone else had recommended. Self wrote: Suzanne Collins’ THE HUNGER GAMES Trilogy. The card she picked out had this book recommendation.

Just in time for the upcoming U.S.Presidential Elections, a book with a very rad picture of Hillary, doing a kind of Dirty Harry pose. ROFL!

Twenty years after the demise of President Snow, Peeta starts having nightmares about the Games again. He’s re-called to the Capitol so Dr. Aurelius can help him figure out why. Turns out there is a mysterious Katniss look-alike named Melania who haunts his dreams . . . and who also happens to be on-staff in the hospital where Peeta is currently being treated.

Coincidence? Or evidence of a nefarious conspiracy? Self’s feeling is —

It happened while she was trying to expand on her reasons for assembling this particular mosaic of images to represent the week’s Daily Post Photo Challenge: ADMIRATION.

And she couldn’t find a previous saved version. Gaaaah! And in re-selecting images, she decided to stop at six instead of the eight she originally had. And she also substituted some images. Sorry for the confusion!

Lady in Red: Ger, chef of Cork’s pre-eminent restaurant, Café Paradiso. Such a great chef, and also very direct and witty! Self loves Ger.

The mother-daughter team who cook and manage Chez Mamie, 22 Hanway Street, London. They make London feel like home.

SeaCity Museum, Southampton, England: Thank you to Joan McGavin, who took her here last year. What a great exhibit on the Titanic. While other cities lay claim to having the best exhibits on the tragedy, Southampton’s is so poignant because it focuses on the crew, most of whom were from this city. And therefore, the focus of the displays is on working-classpeople. Which makes this a much more layered story. In one gallery, there’s a map on the floor with red dots representing the houses of each of the victims. The dots are clustered around the poorer sections of the city.

Last but not least: Nutschell Ann Windsor, Program Administrator for UCLA Extension’s on-line Writers Program. She is the best. She not only handles all requests with Zen calmness, she is a writer herself. And an editor. She’s holding an anthology she edited.

Ger in Front of Café Paradiso, Self’s Go-To Restaurant in Cork

Katniss, page from Costume Designer’s Sketch Book for The Hunger Games

Met the poet and Crab Orchard Review editor Allison Joseph at the AWP Book Fair in Minneapolis, April 2015.

Such a Team! This Mother and Daughter Own Chez Mamie, 22 Hanway Street, London: They’re originally from Belgium.

Further Areas of Southampton Showing Homes of the Titanic crew who drowned

Nutschell Ann Windsor is a graduate of the University of the Philippines, a UCLA Extension Program Administrator, and co-editor of an anthology called SPROUTS.

And now self will post before she accidentally deletes something again.